October 2012 has seen the highest activity on Tails development mailing list
since it is publicly archived (September 2010). This reflects how much
work is done to slowly make Tails better and better. More details follow.

Releases

Tails 0.14 is on its way. A first release candidate was released on the 12th
with pretty good reactions so far. This new version will catch up with
long awaited, unspectacular but important features, and fix an
impressive amount of small bugs.

While testing the first release candidate, we found I2P unable to work
properly. The source of the problem was ultimately determined to
a random bit
flip.

What should have been an easy update to the next "Entreprise Stable
Release" of Iceweasel (Debian unbranded Firefox) left us cold with a
half-working Torbutton. This required us to hurry on fixing this
standing problem: we now have our own APT repository and a custom
Iceweasel package which includes TorBrowser patches for anonymity.

This got included in the second release candidate, released on the
30th, together with translation updates. Unless a major issue shows up,
Tails 0.14 should be released on November, 6th.

People

Tails has been started and successfully connected to the Tor network
around 80.420 times in September. That makes a boot every 33 seconds on
average. This number is an approximation from the requests made for the
security announcements feed. The later is retrieved by Tails after being
connected to Tor to eventually encourage users to update.

50 reports were received through WhisperBack.

The forum activity is still really intense: 1542 messages, 161 signed by Tails.

Code

The ?bug that sometimes made Iceweasel open PDF with Gimp or MP3 with
Audacity has been
fixed.

Whisperback
1.6.1
fixed the inability to resend a bug after a network problem and some
other minor issues.

Infrastructure

Our own APT repository deb.tails.boum.org has gone live on the 24th.
This already enables us to use big custom packages (Iceweasel). In the
mid-term, we will be able to remove binary packages from our main Git
repository. And on the long run, this will enable more control over
our freezes, as well as proper source distribution.

In order to get commit announcements back on
IRC, we have setup an
instance of GitBot on #tails-dev. Unfortunately, this did not work
as expected, and repo.or.cz admins explained us that they do not
support commit notifications for mirror projects. Next steps are left
to be determined.